Kim Philby: His Most Intimate Betrayal, episode one, BBC Two, review

Ben Macintyre's documentary Kim Philby: His Most Intimate Betrayal was an
irresistible tale of double dealing and intrigue, says James Walton

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Man of mystery: Ben Macintyre tells the story of double agent Kim Philby in the BBC Two documentary Kim Philby: His Most Intimate BetrayalPhoto: BBC

By James Walton

10:00PM BST 02 Apr 2014

Nicholas Elliott (Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge) didn’t have much trouble becoming a spy. At an Ascot race meeting in 1939, aged 22, he told Sir Robert Vansittart — an old Foreign Office hand and friend of his father’s — that he’d like to join the intelligence services. “I am relieved you have asked me for something so easy,” Sir Robert replied.

This was the starting point for Ben Macintyre’s Kim Philby: His Most Intimate Betrayal (BBC Two) — and the deft use of telling detail certainly didn’t end there. Elliott’s first posting, we learned, was to the services’ distinctly unglamorous wartime HQ of Wormwood Scrubs. More congenially, by 1942 he was in Istanbul where one of his key duties was to hang out in Taksim’s nightclub, a place winningly filled with assorted secret agents, dubious Hungarian countesses and belly-dancers from Bradford.

Before he went, though, Elliott had been unwise enough to begin a long friendship with another Trinity man, Kim Philby — and to prove it, the programme reconstructed their conversations rather in the style of a Stephen Poliakoff drama, with their remarks languidly exchanged in elegant London clubs over good Scotch. But what Elliott didn’t know (words that became almost a catchphrase last night) is that Philby had been a Soviet agent since 1934. He continued not to know for nearly two decades as his and others’ state secrets went straight to Russia — and, in a move that still beggars belief, Philby was appointed head of MI6’s anti-Soviet section. (Understandably, Moscow was ecstatic at the news.) Thousands died as a result of his treachery.

Philby’s story has of course been told many times, but yesterday’s programme reminded us why: because it’s completely irresistible. Not only does it startlingly combine the personal and the world-historical, but it also reveals the British class system in all its tragicomic pomp. At one point, Elliott was asked by one of his bosses whether his parents knew what he did. (They weren’t supposed to.) Yes, Elliott replied: his mother had been told by a cabinet minister at a cocktail party, and his father by the head of MI6 at the bar in White’s. Nor could Philby have possibly got away with abetting mass murder for so long if he hadn’t been “the right sort”.

MacIntyre’s most original contribution was to bring Elliott into the foreground, where he already seems like a properly tragic dupe, with more clearly to come in tonight’s concluding episode. (Given E M Forster’s famous choice between betraying your country or your friend, Philby firmly opted for both.) Fortunately, he does the more familiar stuff well too, with plenty of terrific set-pieces to accompany those telling details. He also carries out the duties of a modern TV historian with good grace — whether that means delivering his script from the shadows or performing both parts in key conversations, complete with theatrical expressions of surprise. Only occasionally do you sense that he might actually prefer to just tell us all the interesting things he knows — most notably when he was required to impersonate Philby sprinting home after he found out about the defection of Guy Burgess.